I am not a native speaker and it sometimes surprise me how many different meanings some words have. An example is the word call - when I was learning English I thought it was only "shout" or "to ring someone" but the list of meanings is almost endless: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/call .

What are some other such words so that I can be careful when interpreting their meaning? As if I could execute the query "give me a top ten list of words with most definition lines on TheFreeDictionary".

this does not help you to be more careful when interpreting the meaning of words. Lots of words have lots of different meanings.Did you know you can have loud tie, rude stones, or stump speech?
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Theta30Sep 20 '11 at 2:44

7 Answers
7

For a long time, "set" had the most meanings in the OED, but now it is "run". From the New York Times of 25th May 2011:

Which is the most lustrously complex word among the three quarters of
a million or so words and senses that make up this vast mongrel tongue
we know as the English language?

Well, according to the O.E.D.’s chief editor, John Simpson, we now
have a winner — and a winner that may well say something about the
current state of English-speaking humankind. For while in the first
edition of the O.E.D., in 1928, that richest-of-all-words was “set”
(75 columns of type, some 200 senses), the victor in today’s rather
more frantic and uncongenial world is, without a doubt, the
three-letter word “run.”

... Mr. Gilliver has finally calculated that there are for the verb-form alone of “run” no fewer than 645 meanings. A record.

In terms of sheer size, the entry for “run” is half as big again as that for “put,” a word on which Mr. Gilliver also worked some years ago. But more significantly still, “run” is also far bigger than the old chestnut “set,” a word that, says Mr. Gilliver, simply “hasn’t undergone as much development in the 20th and 21st centuries as has ‘run.’ ”

Does this mean that "break" has most different meanings? In other answers it has been suggested that such word is "set" which is only eleventh on this list.
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BorekSep 20 '11 at 12:38

1

@Borek It means it has the most definitions in the WordData set, which is based on a wide range of sources. If you're counting meanings, it depends on whose meanings they are. WordData is a good sample in that you can search and analyse it easily with computer scripts: you can get a good feel of the top answers. The OED is good in that it's a single source maintained by a respected authority in English language, the definitions won't overlap. Another dictionary may have another word at the top of the list.
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HugoSep 20 '11 at 13:37

2

@Borek According to WRI, set is the 11th word in the list with 44 different meanings. Please note that I don't claim anything about the correctness of WRI data. Just happens to be the only numerical data I have at hand to play with.
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belisariusSep 20 '11 at 13:42

And you could also limit yourself to definitions currently in use...
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GEdgarSep 20 '11 at 14:35

@GEdgar According to WRI, there are no archaisms in the list, and only one colloquialism (Come about)
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belisariusSep 20 '11 at 15:37

This one I've always heard. But how does that correspond with the Wolfram/Mathemtaica data? 'set' isn't even in that top 20 list. It makes me distrust both the anecdote about 'set' and the Wolfram data.
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MitchSep 20 '11 at 12:37

2

BTW "polysemous" is a nice word, new to me :)
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BorekSep 20 '11 at 12:48

@Mitch Set is the 11th word in the list with 44 different meanings. Please note that I don't claim anything about the correctness of WRI data. Just happens to be the only numerical data I have at hand to play with.
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belisariusSep 20 '11 at 13:41

@Borek: I like it as well, it's a nice heterological word.
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Joachim SauerSep 20 '11 at 13:46

1

This is from the OED dictionary facts page: "Longest entry in Dictionary: the verb ‘set’ with over 430 senses consisting of approximately 60,000 words or 326,000 characters." oed.com/public/facts/dictionary-facts
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ShoeSep 20 '11 at 16:47

I believe the answer is set. It has more than 200 definitions in the OED, organised thus:

To cause to sit, seat; to be seated, sit.

To sink, descend.

To put in a definite place (the manner of the action being implied either in the verb itself or in the context).

To place or cause to be in a position, condition, relation, or connection. (This group embraces a large number of uses in which the precise implication of sense depends mainly on the kind of construction employed.)

To appoint, prescribe, ordain, establish.

To arrange, fix, adjust.

To place mentally, suppose, estimate.

To put or come into a settled position or condition.

To put in the way of following a course, cause to take a certain direction.

Senses perhaps arising from reversal of construction or from ellipsis (their origin being often obscure).

With prepositions in specialized senses.

With adverbs in specialized senses.

This is just for the verb usage, set is also used as an adjective, noun, conjunction and comb. form.

Just to concur with Shoe, I remember reading long long ago - in the Guinness Book of Records of all places - that set has the most (22) distinct different meanings in English.

Another common problem among non-native users of English are phrasal verbs which can appear very similar but have quite different meanings, eg set up, set out, set off, set about, set on, set down, etc. Often native speakers will use these verbs in an attempt to simplify their language when talking to non-native speakers (eg, by using "set up" instead of "establish"), often having the opposite effect.

Yes, I realized that when I was in the UK. Native speakers like to use phrasal verbs while it's exactly what causes me the biggest problems. I guess it's because in my native language, one "logical word" is is almost exclusively written as one "written word", so when a Czech teacher teaches English language she naturally prefers single words (like "continue") over phrasal verbs ("carry on").
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BorekSep 20 '11 at 12:43

In practical usage rather than dictionary definitions, thingamy probably has the most different meanings - it can mean any noun, depending on context, and I think there are more nouns than other parts of speech. There are other four-letter words which also take multiple meanings depending on context.

Another word which can take multiple meanings is 'buffalo' which can act as a noun ( the animal ), and adjectival phrase ( pertaining to the city ) and a verb ( to harass ) so 'Buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo' is possibly the longest sentence made of the same word repeated, parsed in a similar way to 'London cats annoy London cats'